Paper boys on bikes now a distant memory

By Jim Willard

Posted:
08/15/2013 10:17:59 PM MDT

Who'd have believed it in the middle of the last century? For many young boys (not many girls) a paper route was the first paying job outside the home.

Paper boys evolved from the "newsies" of the 1920s and 1930s, boys who "hawked" papers on the street corners in the big cities. Papers in those days cost a nickel or a dime so the profit margin wasn't big, but it was a job.

The image became an American icon for the period. As the sun rose -- and even before -- birds chirped, the milkman delivered his products (another story) and the paper boy flashed by on his bicycle aiming a paper for the front porch. In the small towns and suburbs, news arrived in that fashion.

I never had a paper route, but some of my friends did. Perhaps my folks knew that an early morning commitment wasn't in the cards for me -- the VP of Research understands completely as we typically enter the office about 10 a.m.

There are still small towns and suburbs and newspapers, most of which are published for morning delivery, however, few teenagers are doing the job. News on the Internet and television has cut into newspapers' viability so there are fewer regular subscribers (even though columns like "Trivially Speaking" make the paper worthwhile -- a modest commercial plug).

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The Newspaper Association of America notes that 81 percent of today's newspaper carriers are adults who deliver by car. They can deliver much faster by that means and many of those carriers are probably doing it as a second job. Ours arrives that way and the staff uses the convenient plastic bag for the VP's constitutional walks.

The inevitability of change has taken down another American institution and with it a memory that soon fades.

I can guess the gender of most of them. Roughly four of every five viewers of the Super Bowl watches it just for the commercials.

Anchors a-sway in the Nile? The Egyptians are given credit for creating the first organized navy in about 2300 B.C.

Mine is one of a large number. There have been more than 65 billion original books published.

Been there, read a bunch of it decades ago. About two-thirds of all the paper purchased by the federal government is used by the Defense department.

It's tricky timing yourself. The average person (try to find one) takes about seven minutes to fall asleep each night -- and that doesn't count in front of the TV.

If you've seen enough moonrises you may remember when Diet Pepsi was called Patio Diet Cola.

I can't believe it's very effective. In Australia, some male birds have been observed mimicking the sound of a cellphone during their courtship.

And probably many of them are by cab drivers. In New York City, 167 different languages have been heard and recorded.

Jim Willard, a Loveland resident since 1967, retired from Hewlett-Packard after 33 years to focus on less trivial things. He calls Twoey, his bichon frisé-Maltese dog, vice president of research for his column.